Roger Palmer’s first encounter with the work of visionary artist Chickenman Mkhize was in a 1990 touring exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 1991, following a period of guest teaching sessions at a university in Durban, South Africa, Palmer drove to Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, in the hope of meeting Chickenman, and perhaps purchasing some of his sculptures. He found Chickenman holding court from his outdoor studio in the grounds of the Tatham Art Gallery. 

Palmer returned to Cape Town with several pieces made by Chickenman. In 1992 when the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town invited him to exhibit, Palmer suggested a two-artist exhibition: Chickenman Mkize and Roger Palmer. In turn, 28 road-sign sculptures by Mkhize duly arrived from KwaZulu-Natal. Thirty-three years later, work by both artists from the UCT exhibition are exhibited at Old and Interesting Art in London, to celebrate the life of Chickenman (variously recorded as Johan/Johannes Fanlo/Fanozi Mkhize/Mkize), and his singular and strange artistic practice, thirty years after the artist’s premature death at the age of 36. 

Chickenman Mkhize was born in 1959 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. His makeshift, open-air studio could be found on the lawns near the Tatham Art Gallery,  a public museum, in Pietermaritzburg, the provincial capital of KwaZulu-Natal, where he created sculptures, most significantly in the form of traffic signs. Through assemblage of images and words painted on board, he created striking objects that, by his own account, reflected the situations of his direct environment. His traffic signs convey fleeting warnings or cryptic messages, all with his precisely jumbled, code-like syntax and lexicon. 

Very little information on the artist and his life exists, giving way to myth making that has surrounded his history – many descriptions of him are markedly mediated by a romanticised sense of the ‘outsider’ artist. One anecdote is that he started his art making practice after having a prophetic experience through a dream in which he saw a procession of animal sculptures. His sculptures made itinerantly from discarded materials found in indeterminate places such as city garbage bins. 

An auto-didact, Chickenman has been largely forgotten in the historical narrative of South African art making, despite being included in various significant exhibitions, most notably the Johannesburg Biennale of 1995 – where one of his road-signs was illustrated on the cover of the catalogue. It was a monumental, and momentous, series of exhibitions that ambitiously attempted to redefine the canon of South African art, and attempted to restore global artistic exchange and dialogue after the cultural boycotts of the  apartheid isolation years. It represented the lifting of internally imposed prohibitions and the coming-out of the South African art scene to an international audience. Mkhize’s artwork included in the exhibition read the question ‘But is it art?’, which he had written as Butisi tart? It became the unofficial logo of the biennale, and was used prominently on invitations, banners and posters. Mkhize’s work is representative of a language that is creative, subversive, and critical of the system of so-called “official art.” His work also reflects the political and economic realities and complexities of Apartheid South Africa under which he lived.

The Glasgow-based multi-media artist Roger Palmer was born in Portsmouth, UK, in 1946. Alongside his artistic practice, he has worked as an educator since the 1970s. Since meeting Chickenman, Palmer has curated two exhibitions which have included his work, Earth & Everything, Recent Art from South Africa (1996) at Arnolfini in Bristol and Un Message à Chickenman (A Message to Chickenman) at Optica, a centre for contemporary art, in Montreal, Canada in 1994. 

This exhibition takes its cue from an exhibition held in August 1992 at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, the first institutional exhibition of Chickenman’s work. The work was shown together with Roger Palmer’s photographs and paintings. Reuniting their sculptures and photographs forms a picture of a fiercely independent artist, labouring outside the exclusionary institutions of his home country.